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Why did he do it and why were the Jews innocent?

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Why did he do it and why were the Jews innocent?

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Dr. Mengele experiments resulted in the death of thousand of innocent people.  

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Dr. Mengele experiments resulted in the death of thousand of innocent people.  

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Not everyone made it out alive of his experiments

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Not everyone made it out alive of his experiments

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-Many of those subjected to Mengele's experiments died as a result or murdered in order to facilitate post-mortem examination.
-"In the normal course of his work, he managed an infirmary where the sick were executed, assisted other German doctors with their work, supervised inmate medical staff, and conducted his own research among the thousands of inmates he personally selected for the human experiment program he also started and managed."

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Document7.docx

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Title or Main Description:

DR. MENGELE UND DIE SELEKTIONEN AM APPELLPLATZ IM KL AUSCHWITZ.

Place Published or Holding Institution:

Museum or Other Institution Holdings:

Yad Vashem Library (Jerusalem, Israel). Call Number: 85-0548.

Not available in USHMM Library as of July 2001.

Auschwitz (Concentration camp)

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) --Registers of dead --Czechoslovakia.

Jews --Czech Republic --Registers.

Jews --Slovakia --Registers.

Mengele, Josef, 1911-

YAD VASHEM LIBRARY KEYWORDS:

LISTS - VICTIMS, JEWISH -- CZECHOSLOVAKIA.

MENGELE, JOSEF.

CAMPS: AUSCHWITZ.

Language and Other Notes:

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Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database

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Skip to main content Title or Main Description: DR. MENGELE UND DIE SELEKTIONEN AM APPELLPLATZ IM KL AUSCHWITZ. Place Published or Holding Institution: Museum or Other Institution Holdings: Yad Vashem Library (Jerusalem, Israel). Call Number: 85-0548. Not available in USHMM Library as of July 2001. Auschwitz (Concentration camp) Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) --Registers of dead --Czechoslovakia.

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Why did he do it?
-Josef Mengele wanted to prove that Jews were inferior to Germans, and so he performed painful experiments on them. If they died or caught a disease, Mengele would have said that Germans were stronger and would have been immune to the disease and wouldn't die.
- He had a intention to kill not to save

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-Many people called his experiments inhumane.
-Many of the experiments he preformed were ones he created out of no where and were not actual surgery's that were done. Hint that why they called them experiments because they were not normal.

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II. Why did he do it and why were the Jews innocent?

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II. Why did he do it and why were the Jews innocent?

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Why were the Jews innocent?
Hitler's reasoning for blaming the Jews wasn’t because they deserved to be hated, but instead that they were already dug deep into a hole that made others find it easy to hate this group of people based on hundreds of years of discrimination and false information.
-Jews were an easy target to blame.

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"Twins! Twins!" Ten-year-old Eva Mozes clung to her mother amidst the chaos of the selection platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Before arriving at the death camp, she had been stuffed into a train car on a seemingly endless journey from Hungary. Now, she and her twin sister Miriam pressed close as Nazi guards shouted orders in German.

Suddenly, an SS guard stopped in front of the identical girls. "Are they twins?" he asked their mother.

"Is that good?" she replied.

He nodded, and Eva Mozes's life changed forever. The SS guard grabbed her and Miriam, whisking them away from their mother as they screamed and called her name. They never saw her again.

Eva and Miriam had just become subjects of a massive, inhumane medical experimentation program at Auschwitz-Birkenau-a program aimed solely at thousands of twins, many of them children.

Led by physician Josef Mengele, the program turned twins like Eva and Miriam into unwilling medical subjects in experiments that exposed about 3,000 children at Auschwitz-Birkenau to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical "research" into illness, human endurance and more.

Twins were separated from the other prisoners during the massive "selections" that took place at the camp's massive train platform, and whisked off to a laboratory to be examined. Mengele usually used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny.

Twin studies had helped scientists like Mengele's mentor justify what they saw as necessary discrimination against people with "undesirable" genetic characteristics-Jews, Roma people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and others. But the twin experiments that had helped create the eugenics movement would, ironically, lead to the downfall of eugenics itself.

For eugenicists like Mengele, identical twins like the Mozes sisters were the perfect research subjects. Since they share a genome, scientists reasoned, any physical or behavioral differences in twins would be due to behavior, not genetics. Eugenicists held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behavior and wipe out undesirable tendencies.

By the time twin research began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the 1940s, the use of twins in scientific experimentation was decades old. Though prior twin experiments had produced growing evidence that environment was as important as genetics, eugenics researchers clung to the idea that they could unlock new insights into nature and nurture through studying them.

One of them, Otmar von Verschuer, had significant power and influence in Nazi Germany. He authored texts that influenced Nazi policies toward Jews, Roma people and others, arguing that race had a biological basis and that "inferior" people could taint the Aryan race. An advocate for forced sterilization and selective breeding, von Verschuer collected genetic information on large numbers of twins, studying the statistics in an attempt to determine whether everything from disease to criminal behavior could be inherited. And he had a protege: a young physician named Josef Mengele.

Like his mentor, Mengele was vehemently racist and a devoted member of the Nazi Party. In 1943, he began working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a medical officer. At first, Mengele was in charge of the Roma camp there, but in 1944 the entire remaining population of the camp was murdered in the gas chambers. Mengele was promoted to chief camp physician of the entire Birkenau camp, and became known for his brutal selections of incoming prisoners for the gas chambers.

Mengele wanted to continue the twin experiments he had begun with von Verschuer, and now he had a captive populace on which to do so. Though his earlier experiments had been legitimate, his work in Auschwitz-Birkenau was not. Abandoning medical ethics and research protocols, Mengele began conducting horrific experiments on up to 1,500 sets of twins, many of them children.

The "Mengele Twins" received nominal protection from some of the ravages of life at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were not selected for the gas chambers, lived in separate quarters, and were given additional food and medical care. In exchange, though, they became the unwilling subjects of inhumane experiments at the hands of Mengele, who gained a reputation as the "Angel of Death" for his power, his mercurial temper and his cruelty.

For Eva, life as a Mengele twin meant sitting naked for hours and having her body repeatedly measured and compared to Miriam's. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. "As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp," she later recalled. "But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments."

Eugenics itself was rooted in twin research. Frances Galton, a British scientist who coined the term "eugenics" in 1883, had used twin studies in his earliest eugenic research. Deeply influenced by his half-cousin Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species, Galton became intrigued by how and whether humans passed along traits like intelligence, and preoccupied with the potential of breeding "desirable" genetic traits into humans.

For Galton and other eugenics researchers, twins held the key to understanding which characteristics were genetic and which ones were environmental. Using data collected via self-reported questionnaires, Galton studied dozens of pairs of twins to determine how they were similar and different. He concluded that similarities between twins were due to their genetics. "The one element that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency," he wrote. "It inevitably asserts itself."

Though Galton's twin research was biased and seriously flawed by modern standards, it helped lay the foundation for the eugenics movement. It also convinced other eugenicists that twins were the ideal way to study nature and nurture. But though eugenicists hypothesized that twins could help them create more perfect humans, the results of twin experiments kept confounding scientists. In the 1930s, for example, a group of American researchers who compared twins found a large variance in IQ in twins who had been raised apart but nonetheless shared similar personalities and behavioral traits.

Though twins were "the most favorable weapons" for the study of the "much-debated nature-nurture problem," they wrote, their conclusions suggested that the very qualities eugenicists thought they could encourage by monitoring marriage and eliminating individuals with "undesirable" traits from the gene pool didn't have to do with genetics at all.

The Nazis' defeat ended Mengele's experimentation on twins at Auschwitz. At the end of the war, the "Angel of Death" managed to escape prosecution. Shielded by Nazi sympathizers, he lived in South America until his death in Brazil in 1979.

In the aftermath of the war, scientists grappled with the aftermath of Nazi experimentation and the Holocaust's use of eugenic principles in the name of genocide. In 1946, a group of German physicians who had carried out euthanasia and conducted medical experimentation in Nazi death camps were tried at Nuremberg during a 140-day-long trial. The trial resulted in seven death sentences and the Nuremberg Code, a set of research ethics that has influenced modern concepts of informed consent and medical experimentation.

Only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived. Among them were Eva and Miriam. In the 1970s, Eva Mozes Kor began lecturing about her experiences and seeking out other survivors. Eventually, she and Miriam formed a nonprofit called Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors (CANDLES) and tracked down more than 100 other twin survivors, documenting their experiences and the health ramifications of the often unknown experiments they had been subjected to at Auschwitz.

Most records of experimentation at Auschwitz were destroyed, but the lives of people like Eva Mozes Kor, who died in July 2019 at age 85, bear witness to the twin experiments' brutality. Ironically, the very type of experimentation Nazi physicians thought would uphold the pseudoscience they used to justify genocide ended up undermining the field of eugenics. In the face of unconvincing data revealed by twin studies and worldwide condemnation of Nazi medical experiments, scientists abandoned eugenics en masse and the field died out.

Today, the concept of twin studies has been challenged by research that demonstrates genetic variations even among identical twins. But twin studies are still used to learn more about age-related disease, eating disorders, sexual orientation and more, while a groundbreaking study of twin NASA astronauts is shedding new light on how microgravity affects the human body. But though twins remain invaluable to researchers today, twin studies are still a subject of debate among scientists eager to sidestep their hideous history.

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Why the Nazis Were Obsessed With Twins | HISTORY

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Horrifying medical experiments on twins helped Nazis justify the Holocaust.

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Josef Mengele was the symbol of Nazi cruelty and mysticism

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Dr. Josef Mengele's medical facility at Auschwitz was perhaps the most horrifying place the Holocaust produced. Who was this man behind it all and what made him the notorious "Angel of Death"?

Ask a person to name the worst crime in living memory and the Holocaust will probably be what they come up with. Ask them to name the worst crime scene of the Holocaust and Auschwitz is the natural answer.

Ask a person who knew that camp what the worst part of it was, and the killing center at Birkenau is the hands-down winner. Ask a survivor of Birkenau to name the most terrifying murderer in the whole complex and they'll give you the name of Dr. Josef Mengele.

On June 6, 1985, Brazilian police in São Paulo dug up the grave of a man named "Wolfgang Gerhard." Forensic and later genetic evidence conclusively proved that the remains actually belonged to Josef Mengele, who had apparently died in a swimming accident.

Who was this man and how did he burn his name into the darkest nightmare of modern history?

Josef Mengele's Privileged Youth

Josef Mengele lacks a terrible backstory to which one can point a finger when attempting to explain his vile acts. In fact, Mengele was a popular and witty rich kid whose father ran a successful business in Germany at a time when the national economy was cratering.

Everybody at school seemed to like him and he got excellent grades. Upon graduating, it seemed natural that he would go on to university and that he would succeed at anything he put his mind to.

Mengele earned his first doctorate in anthropology from the University of Munich in 1935. He did his post-doctoral work at Frankfurt under Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was a fully indoctrinated Nazi eugenicist. National Socialism always held that individuals were the product of their heredity, and von Verschuer was one of the Nazi-aligned scientists whose work seemed to legitimize that assertion.

Von Verschuer's work revolved around hereditary influences on congenital defects such as cleft palate. Mengele was an enthusiastic assistant to von Verschuer, and he left the lab in 1938 with both a glowing recommendation and a second doctorate in medicine. For his dissertation topic, Mengele wrote about racial influences on the formation of the lower jaw.

Honorable Military Service On The Eastern Front

Josef Mengele had joined the Nazi Party in 1937, at the age of 26, while working under his mentor in Frankfurt. In 1938, he joined the SS and a reserve unit of the Wehrmacht. His unit was called up in 1940, and he seems to have served willingly, even volunteering for the Waffen-SS medical service.

Between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, Mengele practiced eugenics in Poland by evaluating Polish nationals for potential "Germanization," or race-based citizenship in the Reich.

In 1941, his unit was deployed to Ukraine in a combat role. Josef Mengele - the rich, popular kid and outstanding student - distinguished himself again at the front for bravery bordering on heroics. He was decorated several times, once for dragging wounded men out of a burning tank, and repeatedly commended for his dedication to service.

In January 1943, a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. That summer, another German army was eviscerated at Kursk. Between the two battles, during the meatgrinder offensive at Rostov, Mengele was severely wounded and rendered unfit for further action.

He was shipped back home to Germany, where he again connected with his old mentor von Verschuer and received a wound badge, a promotion to captain, and the assignment of a lifetime: In May 1943, Mengele reported for duty to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Josef Mengele At Auschwitz

Mengele got to Auschwitz during a transitional period. The camp had long been the site of forced labor and POW internment, but the winter of 1942-43 had seen the camp ramp up its killing machine, centered on the Birkenau sub-camp, where Mengele was assigned as a medical officer.

With the uprisings and shutdown in the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, and with the increased tempo of the killing program across the East, Auschwitz was about to get very busy, and Mengele was going to be in the thick of it.

Accounts given later by both survivors and guards describe Josef Mengele as an enthusiastic member of the staff who volunteered for extra duty, managed operations that were technically above his pay grade, and seemed to be almost everywhere at once.

Josef Mengele was absolutely in his element in Auschwitz; his uniform was always pressed and neat, and he always seemed to have a faint smile on his face.

Every doctor in his part of the camp was required to take a turn as the selection officer - dividing incoming shipments between those who were to work and those who were to be immediately gassed - and many found the work depressing. Josef Mengele adored it and he was always willing to take other doctors' shifts on the arrival ramp.

In the normal course of his work, he managed an infirmary where the sick were executed, assisted other German doctors with their work, supervised inmate medical staff, and conducted his own research among the thousands of inmates he personally selected for the human experiment program he also started and managed.

The experiments he devised were ghoulish beyond belief. Motivated and energized by the seemingly bottomless pool of condemned human beings placed at his disposal, Mengele continued the work he had started at Frankfurt by studying the influence of heredity on various physical traits.

Identical twins are useful for this kind of genetics research because they, of course, have identical genes. Any differences between them, therefore, must be the result of environmental factors. This makes sets of twins perfect for isolating genetic factors by comparing and contrasting their bodies and behavior.

Mengele assembled hundreds of pairs of twins and sometimes spent hours measuring various parts of their bodies and taking careful notes. He often injected one twin with mysterious substances and monitored the illness that ensued. He applied painful clamps to children's limbs to induce gangrene, injected dye into their eyes - which were then shipped back to a pathology lab in Germany - and gave them spinal taps.

When the test subject died, the child's twin would be immediately killed with an injection of chloroform to the heart and both would be dissected for comparison. On one occasion, Josef Mengele killed 14 pairs of twins this way and spent a sleepless night performing autopsies on his victims.

Josef Mengele's Volatile Temperament

For all of his methodical work habits, Mengele could be impulsive. During one selection - between work and death - on the arrival platform, a middle-aged woman who had been selected for work refused to be separated from her 14-year-old daughter, who had been assigned death.

A guard who tried to pry them apart got a nasty scratch on the face and had to fall back. Mengele stepped in to resolve the matter by shooting both the girl and her mother, and then he cut short the selection and sent everybody to the gas chamber.

On another occasion, the Birkenau doctors argued over whether a boy they had all grown fond of had tuberculosis. Mengele left the room and came back an hour or two later, apologizing for the argument and admitting he had been wrong. During his absence, he had shot the boy and dissected him for signs of the disease, which he hadn't found.

In 1944, Mengele's zest and enthusiasm for his work earned him a management position at the camp. In this capacity, he was responsible for public health measures at the camp in addition to his own research at Birkenau. Again, his impulsive streak surfaced when he made decisions for the tens of thousands of inmates.

When Typhus broke out among the women's barracks, for example, Mengele solved the problem in his characteristic way: he ordered one block of 600 women gassed and their barracks fumigated, then he moved the next block of women over and fumigated their barracks. This was repeated for each women's block until the last one was clean and ready for a new shipment of workers. He did it again a few months later during a scarlet fever outbreak.

Through it all, Mengele's research continued. In the pointless effort to prove crackpot Nazi race theories, Mengele stitched pairs of twins together at the back, gouged out the eyes of people with different-colored irises, and vivisected children who knew him as kindly old "Uncle Papi."

When a form of gangrene called noma broke out in the Gypsy camp, Mengele's absurd focus on race led him to investigate the genetic causes he was sure were behind the epidemic. To study this, he sawed off the heads of infected prisoners and sent the preserved samples to Germany for study.

After the glut of Hungarian prisoners were mostly killed off during the summer of 1944, the transports of new prisoners slowed down and eventually stopped. Operations at the camp were wound down through the fall and into the winter.

In January 1945, the camp complex at Auschwitz was mostly dismantled and the starving prisoners force-marched to - of all places - Dresden (which was about to be bombed mercilessly by the Allies). Dr. Josef Mengele packed up his research notes and specimens, dropped them off with a trusted friend, and headed west to avoid capture by the Red Army.

Escape To Brazil And Evasion Of Justice

Dr. Josef Mengele managed to avoid the victorious Allies until June, when he was picked up by an American patrol. He was traveling under his own name at the time, but the wanted criminal list hadn't been efficiently distributed and the Americans let him go. Mengele spent some time working as a farmhand before deciding to skip out of the country in 1949.

Using a variety of aliases, and sometimes his own name again, Mengele managed to avoid capture for decades. It helps that almost nobody was looking for him and that the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay were all highly sympathetic to the escaping Nazis who sought refuge there.

Even in exile, and with the world to lose if he got caught, Mengele couldn't behave himself. In the 1950s, he opened an unlicensed medical practice in Buenos Aires, where he specialized in performing illegal abortions.

This actually got him arrested when one of his patients died, but according to one witness, a friend of his showed up in court with a bulging envelope full of cash for the judge, who subsequently dismissed the case.

In 1959, Mengele traveled to Paraguay to treat the former Secretary to the Fuhrer, Martin Bormann, who had been sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg and who was now dying of stomach cancer. In 1956, the West German government issued identity papers for Josef Mengele under his own name and allowed his family to leave the country unobserved to visit him in South America.

Israeli efforts to capture him were diverted, first by the chance to capture SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, then by the looming threat of war with Egypt, which drew the Mossad's attention away from fugitive Nazis.

Finally, one day in 1979, the 68-year-old Dr. Josef Mengele went out for a swim in the Atlantic Ocean. He suffered a sudden stroke in the water and drowned. After his death, friends and family gradually admitted that they had known all along where he had been hiding and that they had sheltered him from justice all his life.

In March 2016, a Brazilian court awarded control over Mengele's exhumed remains to the University of São Paulo. According to a statement from the doctor in the case, the remains will be used by student doctors for medical research.
After learning about Josef Mengele and his terrifying human experiments, read about the Ilse Koch, the "Bitch of Buchenwald" and meet the men who helped Hitler rise to power.

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The Sickening Experiments Of Dr. Josef Mengele, The Nazi "Angel Of Death"

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Ask a person to name the worst crime in living memory and the Holocaust will probably be what they come up with. Ask them to name the worst crime scene of the Holocaust and Auschwitz is the natural answer.

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How I survived Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death” - Vox

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My twin sister and I were used in medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

We were the only Jewish family in the village of Portz in Transylvania, which was passed back and forth between Romania and Hungary. When I was six years old, Hungarian gendarmes took over our village. From that point on, we faced increasing persecution. In the spring of 1944, we were taken from our home to a regional ghetto. It was a miserable experience. Finally, we were forced into a packed cattle car, bound for Auschwitz.

Miriam and I had no control over the Auschwitz experiments: what they put into us, what they removed, or how they treated us. The camp was the laboratory for any experiments the Nazi scientists wanted to do. It was open season on twins and other human guinea pigs like us.

I was treated like a nobody and a nothing - just a mass of cells to be studied

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we were taken to the observation lab, where we sat for hours, naked. They measured my body parts, comparing them with my twin sister's, and then comparing them with charts. They were trying to design a new Aryan race. These particular experiments were not dangerous, but they were unbelievably demeaning. I had difficulty coping with the fact that I was treated like a nobody and a nothing - just a mass of cells to be studied.

On the other days we would be taken to another lab, where they would take blood from my left arm and give me several injections in my right arm. Those days were the deadly ones.

Of an estimated 3,000 twin "guinea pigs," only about 200 survived

Mengele had 1,500 sets of twins in Auschwitz, according to the Auschwitz Museum. There were only about 200 individual survivors. The consensus among historians is that most died in the experiments, and I agree. Dying in Mengele's lab was very easy. There's a reason he was called the Angel of Death.

Years after we had survived, Miriam and I found 122 "Mengele twins" living in 10 countries across four continents. We had a meeting in Jerusalem in February of 1985.

What I found out was that there were many, many other experiments. Most of them were attempts to make blue-eyed blondes in multiple numbers, germ warfare experiments, and so on. Many twins who did not have blue eyes had something injected into their eyes. (Luckily, Miriam and I had blue eyes.)

Mengele was especially interested in kidneys. He suffered from renal problems when he was a teenager, which kept him out of school three or four months, according to his SS file. He was deeply interested in the way the kidneys worked. I know of three cases in which twins developed severe kidney infections that did not respond to antibiotics.

If one twin died, Mengele would have the other killed and then do comparative autopsies.

I nearly died from what they did to me

After one of the injections, I became very ill with a very high fever. My arms and legs were swollen, and I had red spots all over my body. Maybe it was spotted fever; I don't know. Nobody ever diagnosed it.

Mengele looked at my fever chart, laughed sarcastically, and declared, "Too bad, she's so young - she has only two weeks to live." At that time, I knew he was right: I was very ill. But I refused to die. I made a silent pledge: "I will prove Mengele wrong. I will survive, and I will be reunited with Miriam."

For the next two weeks I was between life and death. I have only one memory: crawling on the barrack floor, because I no longer could walk. There was a faucet on the other end of the barrack. As I crawled, I would fade in and out of consciousness. I just kept thinking, I must survive. I must survive. After two weeks my fever broke, and I immediately felt a lot stronger. It took another three weeks before my fever chart showed normal and I was released from the barrack of the living dead and reunited with Miriam. That event - surviving whatever I was injected with - serves as a very big source of strength to me.

Escaping Auschwitz was impossible

People often ask me, "Why didn't you run away?" Those people know very little about Auschwitz. The whole camp was surrounded by barbed wire, which would electrocute you if you touched it. Before you got to the high-voltage fence, there was a ditch filled with water. So as you approached the fence your hands were damp, and you would be immediately electrocuted.

And at age 10, even if I managed to get out, where would I go? Maybe I could have succeeded in running away when we were marched from Birkenau to Auschwitz for some of the experiments. But as far as I could see when we were marching, that was all a military zone.

I made a silent pledge: "I will prove Mengele wrong. I will survive, and I will be reunited with Miriam."

And of course when someone escaped and they turned on the sirens, we would have to stand for roll call for two to four hours until the person was found dead or alive. If the person was found alive, he would be hanged in front of us. If found dead, the escapee's body would be brought in front of the group. The lesson was very clear: nobody escapes from Auschwitz.

So escaping was very far from my mind. What I thought about every day was how to live one more day, how to survive one more experiment.

How my time in Auschwitz gives me strength

When my son had cancer, I couldn't get him to accept the fact that he had to make the choice to fight for his life. No one else could do it for him. I repeated to him the story of my survival in Auschwitz. I said, "Alex, when I was in Auschwitz, the doctors who were around me wanted me dead. I made the decision that I would live. Can you make that decision?" He got mad at me and hung up the phone. He wasn't ready to deal with it.

But he called me back two days later. Alex said, "Mom, I think I understand it. This is my Auschwitz. This is my struggle that I need to survive." If the person who is suffering from cancer doesn't even want to make the decision to live, no one can help him. My son is alive today.

The fact that I have overcome so much adversity in my life helps me have hope during tough times. If I could survive Auschwitz, if I could survive crawling on the barrack floor between life and death, I could probably survive anything. I also like the fact that people who hear me speak can feel inspired. They see that I could do it, and they realize they can overcome whatever they are trying to overcome, too. That is helpful to realize, that maybe each of us can help others overcome by sharing our stories.

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How I survived Auschwitz's "Angel of Death"

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My twin sister and I were used in medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. We were the only Jewish family in the village of Portz in Transylvania, which was passed back and forth between Romania and Hungary. When I was six years old, Hungarian gendarmes took over our village.